Towering achievement

The saga of a visionary businessman, a controversial architect and the Dallas building that would reinvent the skyscraper

On a recent afternoon, Betty Black-Dickerson, an 83-year-old retiree, could be found reading the paper in a lounge at Pegasus Villas, the well-tended apartment house for seniors that has been her home for nearly a decade.

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“I like when you first walk in the door. It’s not closed in. There’s an openness to it,” she says of the building, which is set back behind a reflecting pool at the intersection of Stemmons Freeway and Mockingbird Lane.

Paul Freeman, a four-year resident who was checking his Facebook account in an adjacent library, shared her assessment of the 16-story tower. “It’s a real nice place to live,” he said. “I like the view.”

They are by no means anomalous. Recent visits indicate that residents of Pegasus Villas are happy with the building they call home, and indeed there is a considerable waiting list for its 167 units of affordable housing, all of which are currently occupied.

But neither Black-Dickerson, nor Freeman, nor any of the other residents interviewed had any idea that they are living in one of the city’s most idiosyncratic buildings, an experimental structure assembled like a child’s toy and designed by Paul Rudolph, one of the 20th century’s most prominent — and most controversial — architects.

For the retirees who call it home, it is simply a pleasant place to live, albeit a quirky one.

To most Dallasites it is hardly a landmark at all, but a fort-like tower with ominous blackened windows that suggest a CIA black-ops site.

Brookhollow Plaza, now Pegasus Villas, was designed by architect Paul Rudolph, who embraced concrete as an expressive medium, reveling in the freedom of form and texture that it could lend to his architecture. (Guy Reynolds/Staff photographer)

Typically it is seen at high speed — or, during rush hour, low speed —while driving along the weaving junction of Interstate 35 and Highway 183. If it is memorable at all, it is for the tall rectangular arches that project above its roofline, like the handles on a shopping bag. They are altogether more impressive from the building’s rooftop terraces, where they take on a practically archaic cast, framing views across the city toward distant horizons — Dallashenge.

That the building would now be a home for elderly would have seemed far-fetched to the men who conceived it in the late 1960s. Back then, it was seen as a vision of the future, one of four office towers interconnected by sky-bridges set dramatically around a decorative pond, a corporate city unto itself.

From the outset it was to be experimental, a prototype built using a concrete construction system that would, in theory at least, revolutionize the building industry. That idea was born of Ralph B. Rogers, the largely anonymous visionary businessman and philanthropist who did as much as anyone to build modern Dallas.

The exposed concrete skeleton on the roof of Pegasus Villas give Dallas its very own Stonehenge. (Mark Lamster/Staff)

By the late 1960s, his story was already the stuff of legend, even if few people knew it, then or now. Born in Boston in 1909, he graduated from the prestigious Boston Latin School, whose esteemed alumni include John Hancock, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leonard Bernstein, and another future Dallas leader in business and philanthropy: Raymond Nasher.

Rogers was smart enough to earn a scholarship to Harvard, but too poor to accept it. He entered the world of business and quickly made a fortune selling diesel engines. By his early 30s he was living in a Long Island mansion, a self-made Gatsby.

His seemed a charmed life until 1942, when he came down with rheumatic fever, which hospitalized him for nine months. Upon his release, he vowed to eradicate the disease. He established an institute to research it, recruited leading doctors, and led a campaign to fund their work. Within three years they succeeded. The fever, they determined, could be cured with antibiotics, and the disease was essentially wiped out.

In 1950 Rogers sold his businesses and moved to Dallas, ostensibly to retire in the city that was home to his wife’s family. But he was not the retiring sort, and in the year of their return he paid $312,250 for controlling interest in a firm that made concrete blocks.

Ralph B. Rogers

With that, he commenced a relentless campaign of expansion through mergers and acquisitions across the Southwest, building the company known as Texas Industries (or TXI) into a concrete behemoth.

Its Midlothian plant alone could pump out 1.4 million gallons of concrete a year. It was a shrewd strategy: The region was booming in the postwar years, and Rogers would provide the raw materials to build and pave it. By the time of his death in 1997, TXI was worth about $800 million.

In pursuit of corporate expansion, Rogers gathered 250 building industry executives for a luncheon at downtown’s Fairmont Hotel in late August 1969. “We, and you, have been alarmed about the scarcity of skilled labor and rising costs of labor and materials,” Rogers told them. “The best solution is standardization of building design and materials.”

A new Texas Industries subsidiary, ISOCORP, had been founded to market just such a system. If it seemed futuristic, that was fine, because it was a moment of possibility. Exactly one month earlier, Neil Armstrong had taken his small step-giant leap onto the surface of the moon.

The first, and indeed only, firm to make use of the ISOCORP system was another Texas Industries subsidiary, the Brookhollow Corporation, a real estate investment and development firm founded by Rogers’s son, John Rogers. Under his direction, the company had acquired the 1,200-acre Brookhollow site along the Stemmons Freeway, an area so vast it had its own post office.

There was something poetic about building a new concrete community there, too. Decades earlier, the chalky limestone directly south of the site on the opposite side of the Trinity had prompted the development of an entire municipality, Cement City, that was absorbed by Dallas in the 1950s and is now virtually erased from the map.

Here was the perfect synergy, then: Brookhollow could develop the property on land it owned, using its parent company’s own innovative concrete systems.

The only missing piece was an architect to design the project, and in that John Rogers knew exactly whom he wanted: Paul Rudolph, already lauded in Time magazine as an “architectural Wunderkind.”

Architect Paul Rudolph, Dean of Architecture at Yale University, and one of his designs, the Art and Architecture building at Yale. He also designed Brookhollow Plaza in Dallas and City Center in Fort Worth. (Courtesy Yale University )

“I knew about him because he was the dean of architecture at Yale, and that is where I went to college,” says Rogers. Rudolph had actually given up his deanship by the late 1960s, but Rogers was correct that there was nobody better suited to take on an experimental project using a system of prefabricated concrete modules.

Rudolph, by then, had come to almost literally embody the notion of inventive design using concrete. On the cover of its February 1964 issue, the magazine Progressive Architecture ran a portrait of Rudolph screened over the bush-hammered concrete façade — it looked like corduroy — of his recently completed Art & Architecture Building at Yale, a complex bunker of staggered floors and vertiginous spaces.

For Rudolph, design was almost a compulsion, an intuitive process that even he could not claim to comprehend. “I have no choice about certain combinations of forms, material, space, or architectural considerations,” he said. “They egg me on.”

Rogers was not the only North Texan to look to Rudolph. In 1966, the same year he was commissioned for the Brookhollow project, Rudolph began work on a sprawling concrete building for the physical sciences at Texas Christian University, a job that had come to him through Fort Worth financier Perry Bass, also a Yale graduate. Bass’ sons Sid and Robert Bass would also become important clients.

Rudolph embraced concrete as an expressive medium, reveling in the freedom of form and texture that it could lend to his architecture. He saw it, too, as an antidote to what he perceived as the sterility of the reflective glass curtain walls that had come to define the midcentury skyscraper.

This thinking was exemplified in New Haven’s Crawford Manor, a 14-story tower of fluted concrete blocks animated by ovular terraces that ran up its sides like zippers on an overcoat. It was completed in 1966 but anticipated the future of Brookhollow: From the outset, it was built as housing for the elderly.

The idea of an architecture of prefabricated modules had also been a fascination of Rudolph’s since his days as a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. There, he studied under the pioneering modernists Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann, who had launched their own prefab company, believing that only mass production could meet the needs of the century’s ever-growing demand for housing.

For Rudolph, mass replication of building units offered the possibility of building at a new and grander scale: a “topographical architecture” of city-spanning megastructures.

Sometimes this entailed shaping industrial processes to achieve his goals: When the corrugated effect he achieved through bush-hammering concrete by hand proved too expensive, for example, he developed a fluted concrete split-brick that could be manufactured by the thousands.

The observation deck of Pegasus Villas highlights Paul Rudolph’s use of concrete to create rich textures. By the 1960s Rudolph had come to almost literally embody the notion of inventive design using concrete. (Guy Reynolds/Staff photographer)

“Brookhollow was an important step for Rudolph in his investigation of concrete,” says Timothy M. Rohan, an architectural historian at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of a recent monograph on Rudolph. “For Brookhollow, he developed a system of panels that could be linked together to make buildings that could be as tall or as long as he liked — his dream of a limitless architecture come true.”

His visions, both real and imagined, often met with resistance. His plan for an expressway straddled by plug-in structures across lower Manhattan, initiated at virtually the same moment as the Brookhollow project, proved anathema to preservationists and urbanists alike.

In June 1969, while Brookhollow was still under construction, a fire of dubious origin, but presumed to be the work of disgruntled architecture students unhappy with their workplace, gutted much of Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale.

“There is no absolute way to know if Paul Rudolph is a man of great genius, a better-than-mediocre figure, or, perhaps, a charlatan,” warned one critic.

In Dallas, however, he was welcomed, especially at the office of Harwood K. Smith Associates (now HKS), on the 29th floor of the Southland Center. The Dallas-based firm was hired as the local architect on the project, charged with carrying out Rudolph’s plans.

“He was very cordial, as long as it was built toward his design,” says Owen Hooten, an architect who worked on the project at HKS. “I enjoyed sitting in some of the meetings with him. He was not a prima donna type fellow. You could talk to him. He didn’t get involved in the nuts of bolts of it.”

This, however, was not the experience of contractor Gil Andres, who had been hired to build the tower. “He would not speak to us,” says Andres. “He was just untouchable. We never spoke to the man. We did speak to Harwood K. Smith’s office. And they would say, well, Paul Rudolph won’t consider that.”

That recollection is confirmed by Hooten. “He’d get frustrated because Rudolph would come down and get with the Rogerses, and he wouldn’t find out about it,” he says.

The lack of communication was especially challenging given the complexities inherent in a project conceived as a test-case for new building materials.

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Complicating matters further was that fact that one of the supposed advantages of prefabrication was that various building systems —plumbing, electricity, elevators, heating and cooling — could be installed together.

Another advantage was that it required no complex formwork for the pouring of concrete on site, because materials were all factory-made. This also required considerable coordination.

“It was a very difficult project to build,” explains Andres. “The entire building is precast. The central core carries all the wind loads on the building.” This required installing post-tensioning rods within concrete panels that stretched the entire height of the building — a physical challenge.

Andres could find no crane in Dallas capable of lifting the giant beams and was forced to import one from Houston to get the job done. It weighed 385,000 pounds

The exterior of the building also proved difficult to construct, though it was conceived so that it could be assembled with the ease of a super-sized kid’s game. In a normal office building, panels of cladding are simply attached to a steel or concrete structural frame. But here, the façade was part of the structural system itself: Rudolph designed concrete beams, some 30 feet long, with hooked edges that could simply be stacked up, like Lincoln Logs.

The rooftop arches, or handles, were Rudolph’s means of giving visual expression to this structural system. As he would regularly do in his skyscrapers, he also left that structure exposed at the tower base, essentially hitching up the building’s skirt so its legs were visible.

Rudolph used this same device again locally in his City Center towers in Fort Worth, built for the Bass brothers. There, paired concrete columns are revealed at street level before they disappear behind Rudolph’s glassy façades.

Wells Fargo Tower, one of two skyscrapers designed by Paul Rudolph for the City Center complex in downtown Fort Worth, left the structure exposed at its base, the same technique used on Brookhollow Plaza in Dallas. (Mark Lamster/Staff)

“The worst thing in the world is to not see how the loads of [a] tower come down to the ground,” Rudolph once noted.

At Brookhollow, the most serious difficulty, and one that proved a long-term plague, was the “Span-Deck” flooring system, which consisted of hollow concrete planks pre-stressed on a 500-foot-long production line at a plant in Chalk Hill in East Texas.

The system allowed for a completely column-free interior, but with an unanticipated catch: The plates deflected during the manufacturing process, thereby introducing a three-inch bow into each floor. The ceiling heights were already on the low end, and corrective measures made them even lower.

This problem was exacerbated by the building’s first tenant: the University Computing Co., a data services provider founded by Charles and Sam Wyly. Then as now, mainframe computing requires substantial cooling capacity, far in excess of what that building was originally programmed to handle. Supplemental chillers accommodated that demand, but the added ventilation infrastructure further compromised the floor heights.

The combination was unlikely in other ways. Sam Wyly was Richard Nixon’s campaign director for Texas in the presidential election of 1968. Ralph Rogers held the same position for his opponent, Nelson Rockefeller, and later battled Nixon as a public television executive — he was chairman of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) — just one of his many philanthropic endeavors.

The Wylys occupied the entire building, but by 1976 found the space too large for their needs. They turned their lease over to Mobil Oil, which moved in its exploration and production services division. It was part of Mobil’s broader corporate move out of downtown, which included the sale of its landmark Magnolia Oil building, the 1922 tower surmounted by the company’s iconic neon Pegasus. Mobil remained in Brookhollow Plaza until 1989, when it consolidated operations just across Stemmons in a tower with gold-tinted mirror-glass façades.

That tower, constructed at the same moment as Rudolph’s Brookhollow Plaza, was originally built for the Zale Corp., and its shimmering exterior was intended as a metaphorical representation of the company’s mass-market jewelry. But it was precisely that kind of reflective look — so inhumane that it was used in the dystopian thriller Logan’s Run — that Rudolph held in contempt and hoped his building would displace. Its architects, however, were his own associates on Brookhollow Plaza: HKS

Mobil’s departure initiated a prolonged decline for Brookhollow Plaza. When it was finally converted into the Pegasus Villas apartments, it had been vacant for 13 years, a weed-strewn site surrounded by razor wire, its interiors gutted by vandals.

A service station, designed by Rudolph on the corner of Mockingbird and Stemmons, was demolished without a trace. In 2001, Preservation Dallas placed Brookhollow Plaza on its most endangered list.

It is a fate not unfamiliar to the works of Rudolph, who died in 1997. Last year, his Orange County Government Center, in New York, was effectively destroyed by an unsympathetic redesign, and preservationists are now concerned about the potential destruction of major Rudolph works in Boston and Buffalo.

His uncompromising visions in concrete can be hard to love and a challenge to maintain, though with proper care there is considerable joy to be found in their visual and spatial complexity.

At Brookhollow Plaza, those complexities are present, if somewhat compromised. Beyond the removal of asbestos, the retrofitting of the tower for seniors, by Humphreys & Partners Architects, entailed the replacement of its once pinkish windows, which leaked, with the present smoked variety, a shift that has altered the character of the building, and not for the better.

Within, there has been an inevitable beige-ing of spaces, a move away from Rudolph’s multi-level design, which is inappropriate for an elderly population with mobility issues.

For all those alterations, it still retains its essential nature, and demonstrates that even Rudolph’s most challenging works can be adapted rather than destroyed.

The tall rectangular arches that project above the roofline express the structural system designed by architect Paul Rudolph. (Guy Reynolds/Staff photographer)

It has long been a favorite of local architects and engineers. “Its bold, handsome profile stands out among the glittery procession of glass boxes along the freeway,” wrote David Dillon, The Dallas Morning News architecture critic, in 1986.

“I just think it’s a wonderful building,” says Thomas Taylor, the revered Dallas structural engineer responsible for many of the city’s more challenging buildings. “It was pretty clever the way it all went together. … I was definitely influenced by the design of it.”

That influence is evident in a series of projects undertaken by Taylor in collaboration with architect E.G. Hamilton, most visibly their iconic Chase Building of 1974 in Richardson, which is similarly composed of stacked concrete beams.

That is a not insignificant legacy, though Rudolph’s attempt to supplant the glass box was futile, especially in Dallas, which is defined by its mirrored towers.

“It was a very pleasant project. I’d do another one if I had a chance,” says Hooten.

That is not likely to happen, even if there is an unexpected demand; the precast concrete industry is no longer equipped to accommodate that kind of project. “There isn’t anyone who wants to do those things,” says Taylor. “They just want to build parking garages and highway bridge beams, where they make a lot of money.”

For Gil Andres, that’s just fine. “I didn’t think I was going to live through the project,” he says. “It’s an interesting story of a gigantic failure.”

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News and a professor in the architecture school at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of several books and is at work on a biography of Philip Johnson.